‘Aye,’ Ralph said generously. ‘Don’t come before you’re well. I’m surprised you fell at all, but then, good riders often fall the hardest. I’m truly sorry it was a fall from a horse I’d chosen for you!’

‘It was not her fault,’ I said. My lips had grown cold and stiff and I could hardly speak. ‘It was all my own fault, Ralph. It was all my fault. I should have known better.’

‘Now that’s enough,’ said Richard kindly. ‘I’ll fetch your mama to put you to bed.’ He turned to Ralph. ‘She’s still shocked from her fall,’ he said.

Ralph stepped backwards one pace and bowed. ‘I’m sorry to intrude,’ he said awkwardly.

I held my hand out to him. I wanted to say that he was not intruding, that he would never intrude. I wanted to beg him to look for Clary, to tell him of my foreboding for her, to make him see with the sight that something was badly wrong. But it was no good. I could not tell him that truth. I could not tell him that I had not fallen from my horse. I could do no more than look towards Ralph with one long imploring glance – and then the tears welled up in my eyes and rolled down my cheeks.

‘I am sorry,’ I said in a voice choked with weeping. ‘I am so sorry. I cannot seem to stop crying.’

‘Bedtime,’ John said with kind firmness. Richard came in with Mama and she helped me up the stairs to my bedroom and tucked me up in bed as if I were a little girl again. All the time the tears were rolling down my face and she wiped them with her own cool handkerchief which smelled of lilies, and then tucked it under my pillow and left me with one candle for a light.

I lay on my back and felt the tears roll outwards from the corner of my eyes and down my temples in drying little lanes of desolation. Then I gasped and sat up in my bed as I remembered that my petticoat and shift were stained with blood.

Wearily I got out of bed and went to the chest where I had bundled them, and I pulled them out. The blood was brown – old and inoffensive now. I folded them up and stuffed them on the embers of my bedroom fire. They smouldered and burned as I tumbled back into bed and slept, and it was doubtless the smoke from the fire that made me dream uneasy dreams about an empty house, and men coming with torches, and a fire which burned down the whole house and left nothing but ruin on the land.

Clary was dead.

I had guessed it. I had seen her in danger ever since I had looked along the lines of the raspberry-cane weeders and shuddered because she was not there.

No one knew who had done it, no one could think who would do such a thing to pretty Clary. But Richard said that they had found Matthew Merry beside the body. He was wet through and they guessed he had gone into the Fenny and pulled her out. She was in the river; she had floated down river to the weir above the new mill, but she had not drowned. They thought she had been strangled first and then thrown in the river. Clary would never drown. We had learned to swim together all those hot summers ago.

It looked bad for Matthew. He would not say how he had found her. He would not say how he had come to be beside the river before the search party was out. He would not say or do anything except cradle her distorted face in his arms and weep and stammer her name over and over.

I cried out when Uncle John told me, his face grim with the news Richard brought back to the Dower House. My mama was by my side at once with more hartshorn and water.

‘Drink this, my darling,’ she said, and I drank it, obedient as a little child, with my eyes fixed on John’s face, seeking the merciful numbness of the drug.

‘What can have happened?’ I asked, grief and sleep clogging my tongue.

‘She was strangled,’ he replied bluntly. Mama’s hand flew out to stop him, but he shook his head. ‘She has to know, Celia,’ he said. ‘She has to know what is happening in Acre. Richard is talking to the village youths and girls. No one can think what could have happened. She had been quarrelling with her betrothed. They think in Acre that she meant to jilt him.’

‘No,’ I said swiftly. ‘It could not be Matthew Merry. He has the sweetest temper, and he has loved Clary ever since they were children. He could not have hurt her.’

‘The lad who had the fainting fits?’ Mama asked. Her eyes went to John’s face. ‘He used to faint, and when he came to his senses, he had no memory of himself or what he had done,’ she said, her voice low.

Uncle John nodded.

‘He never did anything bad when he had his fits,’ I said suddenly. ‘Don’t look like that, Uncle John. He just had a weak head and sometimes he used to faint. He was the sweetest boy and he is a dear young man. He could not hurt a fly, let alone Clary! They were quarrelling, yes, but that does not mean he would hurt her. He adored her!’

Uncle John nodded. ‘He knew where to find her,’ he said quietly, ‘and they found him holding her body and weeping. It looks very black against him.’

‘No,’ I said positively. ‘It could not be. He would never hurt Clary. He would kill himself first.’ I broke off then, for I was afraid I would start weeping again. No one in the Dower House knew Clary and Matthew well but me. Mama and Uncle John might be kind, but they had not played with the Acre children under the Wideacre trees. They did not know that those two had been plighted lovers since they were little children, that Matthew would have died rather than hurt Clary and that this quarrel must have pained them both.

‘Perhaps Lord Havering can make something of it all,’ Uncle John said. ‘He is the nearest Justice of the Peace. Richard has gone to speak with him.’

I nodded. The truth of what had happened was only now starting to come clear to me. ‘And Clary is dead,’ I said slowly. ‘Would she have been in much pain?’

I saw Mama’s quick gesture to John again, but he answered me steadily and told me the truth. ‘Only for brief moments,’ he said. ‘The killer strangled her with his hands. But she would not have been in pain or fear for long, Julia. She would have lost consciousness very swiftly.’

I nodded. I could hear the words, but I could not speak, for a rising wave of nausea was threatening to choke me. I could see in my mind Clary’s bright pretty face and the tears in her eyes when she said Matthew had broken her heart and she promised she would meet me at the dancing.

‘I can’t bear it!’ I said on a half-sob. ‘On Wideacre!’

Then Uncle John took one arm, and Mama the other, and they helped me up the stairs to my bedroom. He poured me a measure of laudanum and Mama held my hand until my tight grip on her loosened and I started falling into sleep.

‘Mama!’ I suddenly called out, on the very edge of panic as I slid into sleep. ‘Mama!’

For in that second between sleeping and wakefulness I thought that I was Clary running for my life through the woods of Wideacre, and behind me was the man who was coming to kill me. Coming to kill me because I had seen something so dreadful that he had no choice but to kill me. I had seen that decision in his eyes, and I knew that if I did not rim faster than I had ever run in my life, he would catch me and throw me down to the ground and put his gentry-soft hands around my throat and tighten them until I could breathe no more. And in the dream I was Clary, running as if the devil himself were on her heels. But I was also myself. And I was as afraid as Clary.

I was more afraid, because I knew that when he caught her and she turned around and felt his hands at her throat and saw his face…then I would know who he was.

22

Matthew Merry had been the butt of the village since he stammered his first words. In the hard years he had done badly for food, since his only protector was his grandmother, old Mrs Merry. While her word was law with the older village people, she carried little weight with the younger ones who could not remember the time when she had been the most skilled midwife and layer-out in the county.

He was easily frightened. Protected only by his grandma, he had been bullied from babyhood. I think that was why Clary first treated him so sweetly. He made her feel motherly and she shielded him from the others in that hard little wolf-pack which she ruled.

When he found her dead, he lost all his shy cleverness, which she had seen first and which Ralph had encouraged. The confidence he had drawn from the men who praised his poems deserted him at once and he behaved like the idiot they called him. They found him with her sodden body held tight in his arms, rocking at the river’s edge, crying her name over and over again. The tears were pouring down his cheeks so much that his face was as wet as dear, dead Clary’s.

Richard and Lord Havering’s man took him abruptly by an arm on each side and he made no effort to resist. They took him away from where he had found her, just above the weir by the mill-pond, where the body had stuck. He called her name louder as they led him away, but when they took him up in the Havering carriage with the coat of arms in the door, he fell silent and did nothing but weep. They made him sit on the floor, because he was so wet and grimy from the river. He did not object.


Then they questioned him. Where had he been that morning? When had he last seen her? As he was afraid, his stammer got worse. Richard blamed the stammer upon a guilty conscience; and all Matthew could do was to weep and say her name, over and over again. He could say no other word at all.

My grandpapa, Lord Havering, was not unkind, but he was brisk, impatient with the common people, familiar with lies and deceptions and accustomed to liars and criminals from Acre village. Richard had brought him an open-and-shut case, and all he needed to hear was young Matthew’s confession. He did not shout at Matthew or offer him clemency if he would own up to his crime. He just mended his quill and looked at Matthew with cold eyes. And Matthew, heartbroken, and with the memory of an angry parting with Clary on his conscience – and knowing full well that Clary would only have been walking alone by the Fenny because she was struggling with their quarrel in her mind-stammered like an idiot and wept in his fright. Finally he flung himself down on the floor and said, ‘It is my fault. It is my fault. It is my f-f-fault.’